


Lord God Bird

by aderyn



Series: Deep Map [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Speakers for the Dead, extinctions, genetic material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:53:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They had a case once, a weird one, during which Sherlock actually said that the point was in the digging and the bringing-back.  Not in the solving. </p>
<p>You were extinct once. (John thinks.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lord God Bird

You were extinct once. (John thinks.)

*****           

“I knew Sherlock when he was young,” says Lestrade ,sorrow-eyed, a  bit drunk.  “Younger, anyway. Brilliant and so fucked-up, that boy.“ He’s getting sentimental now, but who could blame him. Sherlock is dead, and that’s what you do when you’ve planted your mournful arse in a pub with the nth pint in front of you, when you’re speaking for the dead.

“I pulled him up by the collar once,” says Lestrade,  “Out of a pile of demolition rubble down at the docks.  Looked like a half-dead  gull, one of those with the black heads?  Wouldn’t let me take him home and clean up him.”

“Feral,” says Molly.

“Wild,” says Lestrade.

“He was very beautiful,” Molly says, and stops, takes a sip of whisky, neat; it’s like her not to go on after that, she thinks, or everyone thinks it’s like her, so she stops.  “I just…knew him a little,” she says, “But it seemed like a lot.”

I knew him my whole life, the part that mattered, anyway, John thinks, but does not say.

*******

Oh,thinks John, did I know him.  Of course I did. I told him I did. But I didn’t tell him I loved him like you love children and animals and the very rare fellow man; not knotted, not helixed,  not in doubt.   I never told him that.

*******

They had a case once, a weird one, during which Sherlock actually said that the point was in the digging and the bringing-back.  Not in the solving. But that was only because it involved the bones of iguanodon, gone since the meteors, dug up in a back garden in Sunderland.

Sherlock liked his natural history, liked it limed with dust and hung on the wall with the chemistry, friendly-like.

_I’ll teach you_ , said the print of the Lord God bird , _how to bring back the dead._

*******

 The Jurassic Coast, where the sea flushes bones from the lime.  Feathery theropod unearthed in Germany.

“All the science in the world can’t bring something back once its genetic material has vanished,” says Sherlock, so many years later. “No point in sentimentalising the bones.”

Ah, thinks John, they thought the ivory-bill was gone; it might not be.

They thought the only one of you had gone.  You hadn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> [The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalus , also known as the Lord God Bird.](http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/arkansas/ivorybill/index.htm)
> 
>  
> 
> [ Dinosaur Bone Found in Sunderland Garden](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-16163115)  
> [ Sciurumimus albersdoerferi](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2167705/Less-Godzilla-Godzooky-Dinosaur-skeleton-Europe-just-foot-long--creature-furry-tail.html)  
> [England’s “Jurassic Coast”](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-death-of-god-england-s-jurassic-coast-yields-subversive-dinosaur-fossils-a-528400.html)  
> 


End file.
